1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a description processing device and a description processing method suitable for realizing an electronic circuit, which acquires the current state of a finite state machine at a high speed, and a recording medium recording a program for realizing the device and method on a computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Because of advance in computer techniques, designing, analysis, evaluation, etc. of semiconductor integrated circuits has been commonly carried out by using a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) system having a behavioral synthesis tool and a logic synthesis tool. For example, Unexamined Japanese Patent Application KOKAI Publication No. 2007-272671 discloses a circuit design supporting system having a behavioral synthesis tool and a logic synthesis tool.
When a semiconductor integrated circuit is to be designed by using the circuit design supporting system, first, a designer prepares a behavior level description including the information necessary for hardware implementation of bit width, etc. of an input port and variables.
Next, by using the behavioral synthesis tool, the designer converts the behavior level description to a Register Transfer Level (RTL) description expressing the logics, which are to be implemented, by registers and logic functions between the registers. Then, the designer converts the RTL description to logic circuits of the gate level by using the logic synthesis tool.
Also in the case in which a semiconductor integrated circuit including a finite state machine, i.e., a state machine is to be designed, the semiconductor integrated circuit is designed by using the above described circuit design supporting system. The state machine is a counter which carries out special operations and comprises the combination of a flip-flop, which stores the current state, a next-state generating circuit, which generates the state to which a transition is to be made, and a state extraction circuit, which decodes tie state output of the flip-flop. The configuration of the state machine is disclosed in, for example, Unexamined Japanese Patent Application KOKAI Publication No. H10-233672.
The operation speed of the state machine affects the operation speed of the entire semiconductor integrated circuit materially. Therefore, the time which the state machine requires for decoding die current state is desired to be short as much as possible. Particularly, when a semiconductor integrated circuit having a state machine is to be automatically generated by using the design supporting system disclosed in Unexamined Japanese Patent Application KOKAI Publication No. 2007-272671, since the number of the states that can be implemented by the generated semiconductor integrated circuit is increased, techniques to carry out high-speed decoding has been desired.